Electro Velvet are a Mick Jagger impersonator and a woman who didn’t make it past the first round of BBC1 show The Voice.
Photograph: Sarah Dunn/BBC/PA

First, the obvious. The UK isn’t going to win Eurovision this year. It isn’t going to win because it never wins; because everyone hates us, because we insist on swanning into the final uncontested like a gaggle of entitled wazzocks, and because we’re not allowed to choose who actually represents us.

An amateurish red button announcement in the middle of Take Me Out doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in a song

The UK knows this, which might explain why it hasn’t really bothered this year. Our entry, revealed on Saturday night, is Still in Love with You by two people called Electro Velvet. Electro Velvet are comprised of a Mick Jagger impersonator and a woman who didn’t make it past the first round of BBC1 show The Voice, and Still in Love With You sounds like a nightmarish (and unnecessarily long) effort to fuse the DNA of Cotton Eye Joe, the 1994 song Doop by Doop and the collected works of Scatman John into a monstrous new form, possibly as a way to deliberately make Europe disassociate with us entirely. Nigel Farage is probably making it his ringtone as we speak.

It’s a bad song, but the announcement was always going to be laden with anticlimax. We can’t win Eurovision with promising newcomers. We can’t win with beloved heritage acts. We can’t even win by reuniting a borderline-contemporary boyband with a huge continental fanbase. The message this year seems to be “We’ve tried everything and we’ve failed, so here’s something that sounds like a million ragtime-era dentist drills going off in unison. Hope you choke on it.”

It doesn’t help that I’m Still in Love with You was unveiled in such a half-cocked way, either. A low-rent, amateurish red button announcement farted out in the middle of Take Me Out is not a thing that naturally inspires a lot of confidence in a song. It’s hard to see how the BBC could look any more apologetic about the whole affair, with the possible exception of somehow releasing it on Ceefax at 3am.

This song is an unelected marauder. It’s Frank Underwood from House of Cards in song form

Hopefully, though, this is a nadir. Hopefully the BBC will make a bigger deal about next year’s entry. Hopefully they’ll even do the unthinkable and allow some level of public consultation on the song choice. This is a long shot, but maybe they’ll even televise it. Even if it’s just a week of shows on BBC Three, allowing us some form of control over our entry is the only way to stop terrible mistakes like this from ever happening again.

Yes, we entered some stinkers during the bad old days of A Song For Europe. But at least they were stinkers we agreed on. They were our stinkers. This, meanwhile, is an unelected marauder. It’s Frank Underwood from House of Cards in song form. Well, enough’s enough.

It feels mean-spirited to criticise Electro Velvet too harshly for this. After all, they didn’t write the song – that was the man who wrote the Jim’ll Fix It theme tune – and they certainly weren’t the ones who let it represent the UK. They’re just jobbing performers with an upsetting lack of taste. Our real scorn should be directed at the people who organise the UK entry; the ones who chose this song and hid their process from view. They’re the reason why we’re going to collectively hide our faces behind a pillow come May, and they deserve to be punished. Surely we can do better than this.